


When It Happens

by nnozomi



Category: Fire and Hemlock - Diana Wynne Jones
Genre: F/F, F/M, Futurefic, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-04
Updated: 2019-12-04
Packaged: 2021-02-18 02:41:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,503
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21670501
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nnozomi/pseuds/nnozomi
Summary: Fiona Perks has never wavered when it comes to Polly, and now she knows why. But spells are easier to cast than to break.
Relationships: Fiona Perks/Polly Whittacker, Thomas Lynn/Polly Whittacker
Comments: 28
Kudos: 46
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	When It Happens

**Author's Note:**

  * For [DesireeArmfeldt](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DesireeArmfeldt/gifts).



_"We may be late developers," Fiona said, "but when it happens, everyone watch out!"_

Fiona and Polly had been going to go to the concert together. Leslie Piper was getting to be well enough known that tickets were not easy to get even for old acquaintances, but this time Nina Carrington, of all people, had sent them a pair. Nina was making a name for herself of sorts as a presenter on an alternative radio show, with a reputation for having a big voice and a big presence, going to bed with any and all of her guests, and picking the newest trends as they happened; she had all kinds of windfalls, and last week their post had turned up a battered envelope with the radio station’s logo, containing the two tickets wrapped in a flyer, with “For old times sake!” written over the printed text in the fancy scrawl Nina had cultivated.

The trouble was, that very morning Polly’s boss Georgina had gone down with the flu, and Polly had to take Georgina’s place at a dinner for one of their more lucrative authors. “I’m just a dogsbody, I don’t edit important people like her, they could get by quite well without me,” Polly had grumbled, but this seemed to belie the good opinion held of her by Georgina and Georgina’s boss Mr. Rubinstein. Fiona told her it was all part and parcel of being a Bright Young Thing in publishing and sent her off in her good black suit, after making sure no wisps of hair were sliding out of her bun.

Without Polly the concert was only marginally interesting. Fiona enjoyed classical music well enough but wasn’t especially passionate about it, and though she could quite see why so many girls fell for him then and now, Leslie Piper wasn’t her type. Even if Hans hadn’t cured her of blond men once and for all, the pliant softness about Leslie’s features would have put her off.

But he was still worth hearing; more than ever he was a brilliant flautist, with high notes that skimmed and sparkled like sun on water and low ones that shimmered like mother-of-pearl. And afterwards, just as requested, she went round to give him Polly’s regards.

It took quite a while; there was a hedge of young women of all shapes and sizes around Leslie’s dressing room, some cradling bouquets, all positively panting. Fiona made herself comfortable on a folding chair in the hallway and got through nearly half a chapter of _The Daughter of Time_ before the crowd thinned.

Leslie, looking somewhat windblown, was taking off his necktie in the middle of a sort of makeshift floral border. He looked up in dismay as she came in, and then seemed to recognize her, with a grin. “Long time no see.”

“Hello, Georgie Porgie. Lovely concert. Polly got called away for work; she sends her regrets.”

“What’s she doing now? Sit down and tell me all about you lot. I haven’t seen her in—well.” Not quite since that Halloween, Fiona knew—Tom kept something of an eye on Leslie, for reasons she didn’t quite follow, something to do with a request from Leslie’s mother (who either was or was not Tom’s sister)—but they didn’t meet often these days.

She sat down and told him about Polly’s job as a junior editor at Gollancz, reading unsolicited manuscripts and copy-editing the ones that made it through, and her own work teaching history at a girls’ grammar in North London, and the tiny flat they shared in Wymering Avenue near Maida Vale—larger than their Oxford digs, so that it was actually possible to have a room for communal use that neither of them slept in, but only just. Leslie laughed at her stories of Polly’s dreadful authors and her own bolshie pupils, not to mention the flat, and told her in return about nagging agents and knicker-flinging groupies (“honestly! I didn’t pick them up, though. The knickers, I mean. Or the girls”) and a young composer from the RCM who had written two stunning sonatas for him to play.

“Nice to know there’s someone on my side,” he remarked a little wistfully, “in it with me for the music, not just trying to earn money off me or get me into bed, you know? You and Polly are lucky, you are, the way you’ve stuck together.”

“I suppose we are,” Fiona said. She felt an odd chill, lips and fingertips cold. “Take good care of yourself, Leslie. I’d better be getting home while the Tube is running.”

“Good of you to come by, Perks. Tell Polly I said hullo.”

“Will do,” Fiona said, and left the dressing room in more of a hurry than she need have done. On the Underground she stared out of the window at the tunnel blackness, hands colder than ever, trying to pin down what it was that had so shaken her without breaking the surface of her mind’s awareness.

_You and Polly…the way you’ve stuck together…_

There had been a time, of course—the chill spread through the bones of her face as she worked her way back—when there hadn’t been any such thing as Fiona-and-Polly. If anything it had been Polly-and-Nina back then. Polly had also thrown many admiring glances at…what had her name been?...Kirstie, the older girl, while treating Fiona as a bit of an annoyance. Fiona had bided her time, fascinated by the contradictions that began, but did not end, with Polly’s delicacy of feature and strength of limb, and somewhat encouraged by the way Polly’s friendship with Nina seemed to work like bumper cars, forever bouncing off in opposite directions.

And then the pantomime. Being cast opposite Polly in the end had seemed a tremendous opportunity…

…and Fiona had used it, hadn’t she? Made the most of it with all the passion of a thirteen-year-old, absent any perspective whatever. She hadn’t known what she was doing, not really, but that was no excuse.

After Polly’s Halloween—Polly and Tom’s Halloween—she would have understood. At that point, of course, she was nineteen-going-on-twenty and would have been more sensible than to do any such thing in the first place. Perhaps. But if she had done a mad thing like that anyway—and she would have _known_ all the time it was madness, she’d known at thirteen, she’d known at fifteen with Hans—she would have understood exactly what she had been doing, and what it might do to her.

At thirteen, if she had known better, she might have done worse. Worse than a pink paper heart with _polly pierrot perks perkin peterkin pierrot pierrette fierrette fear fia fiona fie on her heroine hero pierrot polly_ written in pale ink around the edge over and over, in letters so tiny her hand had been shaking by the time she finished, very late at night in her room with a towel along the door so Mummy wouldn’t notice she was still awake.

Fiona got off the Tube at Maida Vale from sheer spinal reflex and returned to the flat on automatic the same way. There was a note on the table in Polly’s handwriting: _Much too much wine at dinner! Don’t worry, no foolish enterprises undertaken. Going to SLEEP. Tell me all about Leslie tomorrow. P_.

Polly’s door was half open; she did seem to have managed to get into her nightgown, but she was sprawled on top of the coverlet with her hair trailing off the edge of the bed, fine strands trembling just perceptibly as she breathed. Fiona filled a glass of water and set it on Polly’s nightstand, closed the door very gently, and fled to her own room to plunge into sleep.

The next day Polly was bleary but cheerful, well awake even before Fiona was. They swapped stories of the concert and the sybaritic dinner, treated themselves to a lengthy Full English at the caff on the corner, complete with fried bread, and walked down for a stroll by the canal. Fiona was brisk, chatty, humorous; she ate her bacon and mushrooms and fried tomatoes, commented on the cheekiness of the ducks in the Grand Union, passed on some of Leslie’s more scurrilous escapades and debated to what extent he had embroidered them, all just as usual. She had made herself compress the chill of last night into a walnut-sized lump of ice somewhere under her breastbone; every time Polly looked her way, laughed at something she said, walked in stride alongside her, the ice-lump shifted and sent shivers sliding over her skin, but she refused to acknowledge it until they were both back in the flat for an evening of work.

Alone in her room, with essays to be marked spread out over her desk and a mug of strong tea on the shelf, Fiona let the cold speak: _Admit it._ _I’m doing to her what that woman did to her Tom._

She shuddered all over, cold washing through her whole body until the top of her head prickled with it. Hugging herself, she tried not to rock back and forth with horror. One room away, Polly was peacefully listening to the _Unfinished Symphony_ and working through a vast untidy pile of manuscripts; later she would claim that most of them were worse written than Fiona’s fourth formers’ essays. She thought she was content and comfortable and leading her own life while Tom Lynn was elsewhere, and she didn’t know that _one room away_ was as far from Fiona as she was ever likely to get. She might not ever realize it herself. Fiona pressed both hands hard over her mouth, to keep herself from moaning out loud, or being sick all over Clematis Jin’s essay on Richard III or Diana West’s on Eleanor of Aquitaine.

 _What’s done can’t be undone_ , she knew; Hans had taught her _that_ much, if nothing else. What, then, could be done now?

If it really was a spell she had cast—well, she knew two people with experience in breaking spells. One was out of the question, but the other ought to have the greatest investment in putting his know-how at her service.

Asking Polly to put her in touch with Tom directly seemed like a very bad idea, for at least three separate reasons. Fiona wrote to the record company instead, and asked them to have Edward Davies contact Fiona Perks at Tanthare Engagements soonest.

To her relief, the quartet was in England at the moment--they still recorded and performed together on and off, Polly said, although Ed was soloing as well as Tom while Ann and Sam did more orchestral work these days--and she got a call one evening the next week. Polly was in the next room, but the sounds of the mad waltz of the _Symphonie Fantastique_ seemed likely to stop her ears.

Fiona kept it short and sweet. “My name is Fiona Perks and I’m Polly Whittacker’s flatmate. I’d like you to put me in touch with Thomas Lynn. Polly doesn’t need to know about it. It’s not to do with Polly and Tom, at least not in that sense.”

“Interesting,” Ed Davies said mildly on the other end of the phone, a light tenor with just a bare hint of Welsh lilt remaining. “You’re that one, aren’t you? The one I never got to go on a blind date with.”

“That would be me,” Fiona agreed, thinking back to that summer when all her Polly news had come through a miserable fog of shingles. “I’d have been a bit young for you then, in all fairness. If you really feel the need at this point, I’m open to invitations, but I do need to talk to Tom.”

“You’re on,” Ed said promptly. “Shall we combine the two? Tom and I are recording the Schumann and Arensky trios next Tuesday in London with Kim Hasegawa; we could meet you afterward for coffee or a drink?”

“I’ll need to see if I can get away from school—“ it wasn’t as if her job _mattered_ set against the truth of this, but she wasn’t going to risk her paycheck if there was a feasible alternative—“and if I can come up with a good excuse for Polly. For the moment. I expect she’ll hear about it later,” not knowing whether this might end up true.

Fiona had last seen Thomas Lynn a little over six months before, when she and Polly had gone to hear him play the Elgar concerto, and she had greeted him at the stage door before sending Polly off with him. Unlike Leslie, whose pretty face was incidental to his gifts and would, commensurately, fade as he grew older (she was momentarily amused, and a little touched, by a vision of Leslie at fifty, plump, balding and much crinkled around the eyes), Tom Lynn’s good looks were far more evident when he was playing the cello, and seemed to emerge in part from the working of the music itself in his bones. When in mufti away from his instrument, he was just a fair, bespectacled man in his thirties, nice-looking if you took the trouble to notice him but nothing you’d think twice about once you’d had a bit of experience elsewhere. Unless you were Polly, she supposed.

Ed Davies, whom Fiona was meeting in person for the first time, was in fact rather better-looking than she’d expected from the press photos of the quartet: certainly less conventionally handsome than Leslie or even Tom, with his chubby build and wild curly hair, but with a pleasant chestnutty coloring and a bright energy about him that reminded her a little of Polly’s grandmother, though less neat and tidy by far. She was also amused that, like many men, he obviously found her attractive in return, and unlike most, he was cheerfully up-front about letting her know it while making sure she knew the next move was hers.

It was a heavy, damp, cloudy day, the kind of weather where you wanted to duck to keep your head under the oppressive low sky; nearly dark already by the time Tom and Ed met Fiona in the coffee bar they had agreed on. They both ordered the largest cups of coffee available, and Ed plunged happily into the plate of shortbread she had ordered for the table.

“Polly’s not ill?” Tom wanted to know, gulping coffee.

“No, no. I would have phoned you if she were.” Fiona noted that much of the tension in his face and shoulders remained.

“He thinks you’ve called us here to warn him off her at last,” Ed provided helpfully, brushing shortbread crumbs off his fuzzy roll-neck. “I told him you said it wasn’t that, but he has this dreadful habit of not believing me.”

Tom gave him a weary look and turned his full attention to Fiona. “If that’s what it is, I’ll listen.”

“That’s not what it is.” Fiona poured more hot water into her mug of tea. “I think I’ve called you here to ask you to warn _me_ off her.”

The long fair face and the round Welsh one both turned looks of confusion on her. She plunged onward.

“Polly and you. What happened on Halloween five years ago. I think I’ve—I’ve done something like that to her.”

Ed and Tom exchanged brief, unreadable glances. “Have you talked to her about this?” Tom asked, without particular inflection.

“Not yet,” Fiona admitted. “I couldn’t—well, I just couldn’t.” She bent her head.

Tom sipped his coffee much more slowly than before. “I don’t know how much detail she’s given you about—what happened on Halloween five years ago,” he said carefully. “Stop me if you’re not following. My…the…Laurel Perry was defeated over me—Polly defeated her—at a cost. Polly told you about it, I think, but I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t believe it. One doesn’t, until it happens.”

“I don’t know that I believed all of it then,” Fiona admitted. “But I knew _something_ had happened, along the rough outlines of what Polly was saying. I wasn’t sure if there was actually something—well, supernatural—or if she’d just come up with a very complex way of describing some rather complex relationships, and either way as long as she was happy with the results I didn’t think it mattered.”

“Happy with the results. Yes. Well—at a cost, I said. Polly had to give me up, you see. We could see each other nowhere.”

“But you _do_ see each other, lots of places,” Fiona said, only realizing too late that she was feeding him a straight line. Ed shook his head conspiratorially at her, and Tom sighed.

“Nowhere is a tricky concept round here. There’s something of a space we’ve always called _nowhere_ , Polly and me, in between the lines of _now here_.” He fished a soft lead pencil out of his bag and scrawled the two words on a serviette to show Fiona what he meant. “And so—Polly writes a story about a dragon and the princess who rescues him—we glean a few days or a week together. I do the Kodaly sonata or the Bach C major suite at a recital—we have a month, here and there. It’s not very predictable, and Polly’s nowhere stories aren’t always nearly so straightforward.”

“I expect it makes for good writing training for her,” Fiona remarked, trying very hard not to feel hurt that Polly hadn’t shown her any of the stories, or even told her she was writing again.

“Yes, it seems to. She’s certainly moved on from the sentimental driv—er, rather derivative and unformed work she came up with in her teens.” Tom winced as Ed elbowed him in the ribs. “Act your age, Davies. Anyway—I’m taking a long route around to my point, sorry. Polly and I have— _something_ together that neither of us could have with anyone else. God knows if she wanted a decent normal relationship with a chap her own age she could have it, I wouldn’t stand in her way—”

“She tried that with old Marmaduke—that is, the kingly Sebastian Leroy,” Fiona contradicted, “and the only reason it lasted as long as it did was the…the way Polly was until that Halloween. She’s always been an ever-fixed bark as far as you’re concerned. The only person who’s stayed in her life, other than her Granny.”

“And you,” Tom said.

Fiona looked down at the amber dregs of her tea. “I wanted to talk to you about that,” she said reluctantly. “I think I’ve done something rather awful to Polly. I didn’t know what I was doing, but that doesn’t make it right.”

Ed snorted, waving to the passing waitress for more coffee. “Titiana, dear, you’re giving me a terrible case of déjà vu. Just how many times have you started a conversation in more or less those exact words, Tom?”

Tom and Fiona exchanged looks of paralyzed mutual embarrassment. “Judging from results,” he said with some effort, “I don’t think you can have done anything as terrible as you’re thinking. Let me make my point once and then we’ll hear it. I think the two are somewhat interrelated.”

Fiona kept silent, with an effort of her own, and nodded. Her mouth was dry, but she couldn’t make herself lift the teacup.

“Nowhere,” Tom repeated, almost to himself. “It can be…a remarkable context for a relationship.” His gaze momentarily became unfocused, the lines of his face softening and firming at once into the look he wore with the cello in his arms. “But not an ordinary one. Though I don’t like to say it, Polly can’t rely on me being around all the time, any time she were to need someone. Even, or especially, if we were to have a child. But you—you she relies on.”

“Hold up, Tom,” Ed interrupted, and from the way Tom turned automatically to him Fiona guessed that this was how he spoke when they were rehearsing. “That’s hardly fair to Titiana here, now is it? You and Polly can’t exactly ask her to stick around to be the dependable backup when fairy-tale adventures aren’t on the card—”

“I may be a redhead, but that would be _Fiona_ , if you please,” Fiona said firmly, addressing the least important point first to regain a little of her equilibrium. “Unless you’d like to be called Tan Thare on a regular basis? No?—” Passing over Ed’s murmur of “Meant with all due admiration,” she went on “What _I_ do in that context is up to me, you must admit. My concern, the reason I wanted to talk here today, isn’t that Polly might choose to rely on me in your absence but that I’ve—bound her to be unable to do otherwise.” There; it was spoken.

Tom, who had spent nearly his whole life moving through and among a complex weaving of bindings of many kinds, and Ed, who had been Tom’s friend and colleague, as well as Ann Abraham’s, for going on two decades, did not react with shock or disbelief or immediate opprobrium. Ed gave her a bright interested look and waited for more; Tom took off his glasses, polished them on a large soft cloth which, from the rosin stains, had been seconded from his cello case, put them back on again and said “Can you be a bit more specific?”

Fiona told them, as crisply and economically as possible, about her—crush—on Polly at thirteen, about the chance of the pantomime to grow closer, and its seeming failure up through the first howler-ridden performance. _Only my spirit!_ had sounded in her head all the way home that night, and later as she lay awake, until she thought of Polly’s spirit and of what _Pierrot_ meant and that she was Fiona _Perks_ , and took the pink paper heart prop (laid aside with her costume to see if the second performance was just as dreadful as the first) and did what came to her to forge a connection, any way she could, between Polly’s spirit and her own.

“I haven’t forgotten that pantomime,” Tom said thoughtfully, after she was done. “Polly was luminescent. I remember her and you and those pink paper hearts, now that you mention it; the red hair was striking.”

Fiona sighed.

“For all that’s said and done I’m a musician, not a…I’m hardly competent to judge whether you cast a spell of any kind on Polly, or whether the spell rang true,” Tom went on, a little more heavily. He turned his coffee cup up for the last drops. “What makes you think it did?”

Fiona swallowed hard and pushed her own teacup away, feeling absurdly that she deserved the dry mouth and sore throat inflicted on her by tension and misery. “Polly smiled at me in the pantomime the next day,” she said wretchedly. “You’re quite right, she was—glowing—and she looked at _me_ and smiled. She’d never done that before. And from then on we became friends, we spent more and more time together. We did athletics together, we slodged together—”

Ed spluttered into his coffee. “Whatever you’re thinking, I’m sure that’s not it,” Tom said parenthetically to him. “Go on.”

Fiona had hardly registered the contretemps. “I was shattered when I thought she was moving away—and then she wasn’t. As if my wishing had worked. She let me cry on her shoulder all summer after—well, after I did something mad. We did Oxbridge together. We spent half our time the first year in each other’s digs or reading side by side at the Camera, and from our second year on we shared a flat, and we’ve been flatmates ever since, after we went down and got work in London as well.” She saw Ed’s somewhat more sober objection coming and got in first. “Yes, there are lots of friends who might be just like that—but—Polly isn’t a clinger the way some girls are, she needn’t have…and she’s had you, Tom, one way or another. She needn’t have—” Quite unexpectedly her voice clogged up and she stopped speaking, looking down at the stained Formica of the tabletop.

She heard Tom saying nothing for a while, with no hints about what was behind the nothing, not while she couldn’t bring herself to look at his face. After what felt like an hour, Ed’s lighter voice said “Ann’s department?”

“She’s overseas.” Tom’s response sounded automatic. “The orchestra’s touring until the end of the month, you know that. Anyway—“

“Anyway, we know what she’d expect of us.”

Fiona nearly jumped out of her skin as precise, steady fingers suddenly tucked themselves under her chin, bringing her head up. It was Ed’s left hand; she could feel the violin calluses on his fingertips. “All right, Titiana, you’ve had your say. If you want the opinion of an ordinary workaday violinist, there isn’t the evidence to tell. Maybe it’s all perfectly natural. Just because Polly got herself entangled with our Tom at such a young age doesn’t mean her having a friend like you must be once out of nature. Or maybe you did cast a spell, and all it did was provide fertile soil for friendship.”

“Or maybe—“ Fiona cleared her throat and tilted her head back a little, lightly shifting her chin from Ed’s touch—“I’ve enchanted…enchained her for ten years, and it’s high time I broke the spell.”

Tom’s head moved so sharply she met his eyes without meaning to; he looked surprised, she thought, and somewhere underneath immeasurably sad, at a level nowhere near what she could touch.

“If Laurel…” he said, and stopped. “Then why not try it?” a little hoarsely. “If nothing else, it will set your mind at rest and give you a place to stand.”

Fiona swallowed, slightly relieved. “How do I go about doing that, then?”

Tom’s eyes widened behind his glasses; he and Ed exchanged looks and shook their heads in unison. “Oh no, Titiana,” Ed said, smiling at her. “You knew how to cast it. You’ll find you know how to break it.”

_I have to give Polly back her heart_.

Pink paper hearts were right out. The only other thing she had been able to think of was that pendant Polly had had for so long, her grandmother’s gift, until one day—just around the fateful Halloween—she wasn’t wearing it any longer. What exactly had become of that little heart-shape, iridescent when it caught the light, Fiona did not know; but it gave her a hint.

She found a jeweller’s shop near her school on Golders Green Avenue, run by a small, silver-bearded man in a skullcap and his plump auburn-haired wife, and went in on a sunny Thursday after the day’s classes were over. Small and a little fusty as the shop was, their stock seemed carefully curated, and it did not take long for her to find what she was looking for.

The heart-shaped pendant was an amber bead, dark brandy-gold shading almost to port-wine, translucent enough to show how fine the links of the chain were as they ran through it. The gold chain was just long enough for the bead to rest in the hollow of her—of Polly’s throat, concealable with a high collar if she ever felt the need to hide it.

Fiona reached out to take it in her hand. Warmed by a shaft of sun from the glass in the door, the bead nestled into her fingers. It was then that a half-seen sweep of silver across the shelves seemed to shift from a rack of fine necklace chains to the fall of Polly’s hair.

Their eyes met. Fiona swallowed, still holding the amber pendant, wondering if she had actually summoned Polly up on the instant or was hallucinating her, or—

“Oh good,” Polly said, a little breathless. “It _was_ you. I saw you go into the shop as I came down the road to the school, but I wasn’t sure it was really you—I only saw the red hair—“ She came around the shelf, still dressed in the good gray work suit she had had on that morning.

“Have you skived off work?” Fiona asked, a little dazed. (Or had she plucked Polly from her office as she was?)

“Oh, I told them it was a bit of a family emergency and I was leaving early,” Polly said easily. “Tom called me on my lunch hour, you see.”

“I see,” Fiona repeated, no less flummoxed.

Polly bent her head to look at the amber necklace in Fiona’s palm. “So do I,” she said, more quietly. “You haven’t got to buy that, you know.”

Fiona waited through a painful judder and bump of the heart in her chest, while the one in her hand stayed still. “Tom agreed with me,” she said, a little more incoherently than she had meant.

“Tom…might not have thought it through very well yet. He’s not very objective about these things, and he doesn’t know you anything like as well as I do.”

Fiona closed her fist over the amber necklace. “Maybe you don’t, Polly. That’s why I need this.”

Polly hesitated for a long moment, all opal eyes and silver-gilt hair (like Elizabeth Woodville, Fiona thought dizzily, having spent that afternoon fighting the Wars of the Roses with her fourth-formers in tow).

“There’s a little caff a ways down the road,” she said, before Polly could speak again. “I don’t know its name—I don’t know that it’s _got_ a name—but you can find it, and it’s off-limits to the girls from school, so we won’t be in any danger of being overheard. I’ll meet you there in ten minutes.”

The nameless little caff was actually cleaner inside than might have been expected, allowing for the large cat sleeping in the cutlery box. The tea was brewed stiff enough to compensate for the rather bendable spoons; Polly ordered a piece of strudel as well.

Fiona set the scrap of bond paper holding the necklace down on the table and drank her tea, almost relishing the acrid tannins. “I think,” she said carefully, rejecting preamble, “that this is something I took from you, at our pantomime. On the second day. I didn’t mean—I swear by everything I hold sacred, Polly, I didn’t _know_ what it would do, what I did. But I did know it would do something. I’m sorry.”

“Fiona.” Polly sipped her tea, winced, and took another sip without thinking. “Tell me just what you _did_ do. Not what you meant by it. What you did.”

“I gave you my pink paper heart, remember? Pierrot and Pierrette. I—“ Sensible, self-possessed, down-to-earth Fiona Perks could not quite bring herself to say “cast a spell on it,” not out loud here, not to Polly. “I used—who we were—Pierrot, Polly, hero, Perks, Pierrette—To link us together—to—“ _Enchain_ was the word she’d used with Tom and Ed.

“I thought so,” Polly said quietly, eyes wide over the mug of dreadful tea. “Tom wasn’t to know—his experience is too different…Never mind that. _Look_ , Fiona. You gave me your pink paper heart, remember?” deliberately quoting Fiona’s inflection. “Pierrette and Pierrot. The spell—“ Polly could say it—“was on the heart you gave me. Your heart.”

 _Your_ heart. Fiona’s hand closed on the amber bead in its wrapping; she let the fine gold chain slip out to twine in her fingers, watching it catch the faded fluorescent light and shine.

She hadn’t bound Polly. She had bound herself.

Dazed, she revisited the last ten years in the light of this new information, her mind snagging on the dreamlike interlude of Hans. Perhaps she had been somehow struggling against the spell, or perhaps the spell itself had been working in mysterious ways. She recalled how instantly familiar, how compelling, she had found Hans’ finely modelled face and silky white-blond hair.

Then, naturally, her memory slipped forward to the look on Hans’ face when his secretary, looking doubtful, had shown her into his office (she’d gotten his company address from the business card on her father’s desk). Puzzled, put-upon, pitying….

This, she had thought as a dramatic fifteen-year-old, is how it feels when your heart breaks. Now she knew exactly what she’d been wrong about then.

Fiona knew she was blushing the bright, unbecoming mauve of her teenage years. She felt almost obliterated with shame, shame at the idea of Polly endlessly, patiently lumbered with a Fiona who dragged behind her by the ends of her hair, bossing her about, talking as if she knew better, ignoring her truths, being worse than Nina ever had been. She saw Polly’s eyes widen in horror—Polly herself realizing what she had let go on?—and shuddered with it. Fiona, who never cried, found herself on the edge of literally weeping with shame.

The good agency of the spell—or perhaps only the intimacy of ten years in close quarters—worked then to hold back the tears; she realized like a clean breath of air on her face that what had horrified Polly was something quite different.

“I’m sorry—” “I’m—” they said together, and Polly, slightly further from crying, came out ahead. “I’m sorry— _truly_ I didn’t know, not until now. But I know I’ve taken advantage. With everything that’s happened since the pantomime—I couldn’t have got through it without you. You hadn’t got anything to do with anything else, not my parents, not Tom or Laurel or Seb, not even relatively—“ a breathless almost-laugh—“trivial things like vivas or job interviews—You’ve always been _—_ just for me. If I’d known—I don’t like to use people. Anything else, but not that. I won’t be Laurel, I _won’t._ I—I won’t take advantage any more. I swear it.”

Fiona, staggered in all ways at once, was lost for words, dazzled by the opalescent refraction as the world rearranged itself once again.

Before either of them could speak again, the cook brought Polly’s strudel, thumping it down on the table and receding instantly to the depths of the kitchen. The strudel turned out to be a solid lump composed of walnuts, raisins, jam, and something that might have been candied fruit, wrapped in floppy pastry and served steaming hot. Fiona and Polly looked at each other over the thick china plate and broke into simultaneous, irresistible, not-quite-hysterical giggles.

“But I’ve always known where my heart was,” Fiona said, with no intention of a non sequitur. “If there’s been any taking advantage, it’s been quite mutual.”

Polly sighed. “I ought to have learned that lesson with Tom. I thought I had.” She pushed doubtfully at the strudel with the tip of her fork. “It hasn’t been just Tom, you know—that I’ve never—looked back at you properly. I thought it would be too selfish of me, to have a—to have someone _now here_ and someone else _nowhere_ —“

Fiona recalled Tom’s scribbled diagram. “Tom and I are the ones who have a voice on that, I think. And it’s not as if—“ She paused to think it out. “There isn’t really room for…I _can’t_ go where Tom is, for you. And he can’t come where I am. You’ve always been the one who can…move between.”

Polly squished off a piece of strudel and put it fatalistically into her mouth. “Polyvalent,” she remarked mysteriously.

“Polyphonic,” Fiona suggested, seeing the point.

“Now you do sound like Tom. This isn’t half bad. Have some.” Polly handed her the fork, loaded with another bite of the mysterious strudel. She was right, it wasn’t half bad. They passed the single fork back and forth until the plate was empty but for a few jammy fragments. Fiona welcomed the respite from intensity, while finding herself uncharacteristically at a loss for what might come next.

Polly, apparently not so, set the fork down with a clink and said “Don’t forget, you still need to break the spell.”

“If I don’t want to?”

“Most people aren’t—bound that way. You could choose not to be.” Polly reached for the necklace, sliding it carefully out of the scrap of wrapping. “Amber. Nice with your hair.”

“Polly…”

Polly let the heart-bead sway on its chain, rich colors shifting.

“I could choose,” Fiona agreed, keeping her chin high with effort. She focused on the pendant instead of Polly’s face. “Either way, it’s a choice. You should know about that one, you and Tom.”

“Oh well, me and Tom…” Polly sighed. “We…Yes, all right, we chose to be bound, within certain parameters. And no, I wouldn’t take that choice back, any of it, but…oh, Fiona! It’s your _heart_ , with all that implies.”

Fiona caught the swinging bead on her palm, and released it again. “It’s amber,” she said, working it out as it came to her. “The past in one drop. More beautiful than it was, but not different. And it’s electrical—it carries power. Current.”

“Past and present?”

“Potential,” Fiona concluded. “Past and future.”

Polly undid the clasp on the chain, taking one end of it in each hand. “Let me give it back to you,” she said, more quietly. “It should be yours, to give. Past and future.” She eased back her chair and stood.

“As I choose?” Fiona’s throat was tight.

Polly laughed at her through the V of the chain, wide open and warm. “Always. I’m not going anywhere, Fiona. Neither is your heart.”

Fiona closed her eyes for a moment as Polly moved around the table to stand behind her, slipping the necklace around her throat. Her fingers were quick and careful on the clasp, just brushing the skin at the back of Fiona’s neck. They paused there after the clasp was done up, and Fiona felt her looking around the caff—no other customers, the windows grimy, the proprietor nowhere in sight. Polly’s kiss was a warm quick brush across Fiona’s nape, making both of them draw breath unevenly. Across the small room, cutlery chimed as the cat flicked an ear, shifted its weight, and settled back to sleep with a muted purr.

Fiona reached back with one careful hand, finding Polly’s wrist and laying her fingers across it. She could feel Polly’s heart beating under the soft skin. The amber bead rested in the hollow of her throat, shifting infinitesimally with her own pulse.

A faraway clatter came from the kitchen and the moment broke. Fiona got to her feet, shifting to keep her hand on Polly’s arm. “…Shall we?”

“Let’s,” said Polly, and they left a stack of pound coins on the table and went arm in arm out of the little café onto the sunny avenue, both of them laughing lovingly, like people enormously relieved about something.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for a great prompt! I hope you enjoy it.  
> The last line, as you will probably recognize, is Diana Wynne Jones’ originally.  
> I borrowed the cat in the cutlery box from another fictional greasy-spoon café, because I just couldn’t resist.


End file.
